Upgrade - 166: The Machine That Makes Money

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

Myke abandons the #plusclub for an iPhone X, and compares notes with Jason after a week of using Apple’s new phone, including cameras, OLED, Animoji karaoke, and Face ID. We also discuss Apple’s latest quarterly results, which show great news for the iPad and Mac and the promise of a record-setting holiday quarter to come.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 166 today's show is brought to you very kindly by fuck over aero casper and encapsular my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hello jason snell hello mrley. How are you doing? I'm doing very well, Mr. Jason Snell. I understand that you are much better rested this week than you were last week. Yeah, I got a little more sleep because I was having a little sleep deficit and it's turned really to the fall here

in Northern California. Hey, but Jason Snell, Jason Snell, nobody cares about that. The leaves are turning. Jason, no one cares about it. It's time for Hashtag Snell Talk. And this week's Snell Talk question comes from Pete. And Pete wants to know,

regarding the Series 3 watch dot, did you ever believe, Jason, that you would beat Mike to putting a sticker on a new Apple product? Why do you have to lash out, Pete? Why do you have to do this to me? Why are you going to put that hate on me pete so uh i i have uh a couple of statements here one is i do have a first off it's not a sticker

it's a decal it's totally different it's a decal that's not no that's the vinyl decal so so are so many of mine jason all right well those those are better than than your paper stickers and and second i i actually have decals on most of the apple products that i use my imac has a rainbow apple logo decal on it my macbook air has a rainbow apple logo decal on it always be branding always on brand so it's not quite as surprising as you'd think. And the funniest part is that I didn't get a watch dot that was black to make my space gray phone or space gray watch less recognizable. Instead, I got one that was orange. So it could be just a little bit off from the red and go with my orange sport band that I wear most of the time. So I have thought about it.

Yeah, it looks I mean, it's subtle, right? In the sense that you could be like, oh, that's that red dot. Well, it's not quite a red dot. It's orange. I have thought about buying black watch shots though and just putting it on and being like, forget about this. So maybe, maybe I'll get there. But yeah, Pete, you know, I contain multitudes.

I sometimes put stickers on things. I got stickers on the back of my iMac. I got stickers on my iPod Hi-Fi. That's covered with stickers because who cares? It's my iPod Hi-Fi. That's covered with stickers because who cares? It's an iPod Hi-Fi. So yeah, anyway. Also, somebody pointed out, here's a little Snell Talk follow-up.

Somebody pointed out that iOS 11, I think, officially does away with the last vestiges of iPod Hi-Fi support. That it used to be certain devices could still attach to the iPod Hi-Fi via adapters and see it and have the setting for like the EQ and stuff. And that's not in iOS 11. They took that out. It's about time.

I can't believe it lasted. Mind-boggling that it's lost. Honestly, if you're going to use the iPod Hi-Fi with an Apple product attached via the dock connector, it needs to be a vintage Apple product. an apple product attached via the dock connector it needs to be a vintage apple product yeah you've got like a little ipod nano just like constantly fixed to the thing and then that's just how it powers the music like that's exactly the way that should work really or you do what i do which is the aux input and i actually wish here's a here's a thing that somebody with a 3d printer could make for me if you're if you're feeling really uh there's a huge market for this which is you know the ipod hi-fi has that dock insert so it came it came with a uh like oval thing around the dock connector that was a fairly deep depression and then it came with a set of plastic connectors and for a while when you bought

like an ipod it would come with a dock connector and they were creating like a universal system where they could custom shape the bottom of your ipod to the dock connector what so what i'm saying is somebody could make one of those that is designed to go around the dock connector but totally cover it and make the top of the ipod hi-fi smooth you could at least sell one of them to you and one of them to steven and that's the whole market yeah yeah it's like it's basically put mothball the dock connector of your ipod hi-fi because that's where i have my little relay fm wood block that you guys gave the hosts last year or two years ago um that's where it is it's covering the unsightly dock connector so they're product idea they'll sell a couple of them two maybe even only one who knows if you

would like to send in a question to open the show just tweet with the hashtag snell talk and i'll be able to pull them into a document and bring one out for a future episode thank you to pete for sending in his question so let's go talk about some follow up i uh saw a couple people tweeting about this and noticed it myself but we didn't talk about it last week because there were so many more other things going on the uh lovely leather sleeve that appeared for the ipad pro um last year or earlier this year i should say now exists for the macbook too there is now a um 12 inch macbook leather sleeve available i saw them in the apple store when i was there on friday um so if you want to carry around your macbook and a lovely little uh leather pouch and either saddle brown or midnight blue go wild it's only 149 so i have the uh because it was part of the apple review unit kit i have that

leather sleeve for the ipad pro yep and i always think about using it. Like, oh, this is really nice. Maybe I'll use this when I travel. And then I think, nah. Like, no. So I think it really is somebody, if you've got, like, really nice, like, a business, like a briefcase, and then you've got this inside it, and you want it to be all very nice and leather and high quality and stylish and all that, then great. But in most of my cases, I've, like, I've got bags with places you put a laptop or a tablet and that's enough i really love to look at that thing though like i really it looks it looks it looks great my issues aren't with the look or the quality of it it is an amazing piece of leather work i think i mentioned on this show before that i was talking to matthew panzerino from tech crunch about it because he's a shoe guy. He loves shoes.

And he was talking about how he's noticed and that other people who know about like leather and stuff have noticed how Apple's leather game is so much better than it was when they did the first watch bands. And that they've like they've really the leather products that they make for these accessories are so good. And here, I mean, it's a beautiful, all these sleeves are beautiful. And there's a reason they cost what they cost. They are a very high quality, very attractive. I don't, the utility does not follow for me. Like it's just not the kind of thing I would use.

But if you're somebody it appeals to, they are beautiful and well-made. Last week on the show, we were discussing the notch on the iPhone X and wondering if any app developers could actually make use of the space. We were talking about the fact that most of the apps that you'd seen, Jason, it was mostly just people were extending the color bar or whatever right to the top. Fantastic Hell is a good example. They just fill the notch, like the ears on the side of the phone they're just red right like the status

bar just extends um there is a an application called uh i'm gonna say it's halide i don't know how you pronounce this halide halide thank you so much h-a-l-i-d-e it's a camera application i'm assuming that halide is some kind of camera thing. It's a film reference. Yeah, there you go. Thank you. I don't understand professional camera apps. So I downloaded this app and I didn't know what I was doing, but it looks very powerful. But what this application is doing, it's putting some like I think it's like focus information and like graphs and stuff up into the notches. So you get more screen space for the image itself.

They're not covering up the image with any information. Instead, they're putting it right up the top and making use of the full screen. I was really excited to see this because it shows that people can use this in interesting ways. And it enth infused me to think of how are developers going to embrace the notch as a as a design element and i think that this is not just a flashy looking

thing there's actually some real utility in the way that they've made this app and and and use the full screen to their disposal yeah not every app is going to need to do that. And I think I've enjoyed some of the apps that are more just sort of extending their user interface or perhaps their, I think it's carrot weather, like their little clouds and other things that kind of extend up there. It's not just the background.

You can draw things up there and sort of you extend your background texture or pattern and it looks nice. But there are some examples where, yeah, you can just take that area over there and sort of you extend your background texture or pattern and it uh it looks nice but there are some examples where yeah you can just take that area over and you put indicators in it and uh that's great looks great and also some follow-up from a few weeks ago we were talking a bunch about apple's potential streaming service and what their content might look like well there was a report from recode and Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago

from Peter Kafka and Lucas Shaw respectively, that Apple are apparently when they're talking to Hollywood executives or they're talking about people who want to pitch content to them, that they want family-friendly content

for their streaming service. They do not want to feature sex or violence in their programming and me and you were talking about this and i think we both came to the uh belief like we both kind of agreed to the point that we believed that they would have this right like they would go in the hbo uh direction but it looks like they have said they want to be family friendly apple want comedies and emotional dramas with a more broad appeal. And I think this is a hilarious quote. They don't want kids to see a stray nipple is a quote that came from somebody in Hollywood.

So this may be true, although I still have a hard time believing that this is absolutely the long term story. If you read the Recode story, I think it is closely, what you'll see is a description of how they anticipate Apple's rollout of the service to be, which is they anticipate that the first shows that are stoking interest in Apple's originals are going to be either given away to everyone who owns an Apple device, or they're going to be, you know, maybe they'll be part of Apple music. But the suggestion in the recode story is that everybody who gets an Apple device is going to be given these shows. And there's a question of

will that mean they launch the service? And if you've got an Apple device, you get the first six months free or something like that the first three months free, where they would drop these first shows. The point in the recode story is that they anticipate that the initial shows are going to be available to everyone and with no filter and no sort of like self, you know, trying to, I guess the way I would put it is it's a little more like turning on broadcast TV in the sense of like everybody gets it. You don't choose to sign up for it or choose to tune in for it. And what they want is to make those shows have broad appeal and not

lead to stories about, I was offended by this thing that Apple did, even though we are full of adult content shows these days. So I think I'm going to choose to read it and maybe this is wishcasting, but I'm going to choose to read that as Apple's launch plan is for broad because they know those first shows are going to get sampled broadly and then when they're building their subscription service they will start to add shows that have more limited appeal like adult appeal because they want uh you know they want to have a spread of it but Tim Goodman and I talked about this on TV Talk Machine last week and you know they want to have a spread of it but tim goodman and i talked about this on tv talk machine last week and you know his he's about as incredulous as i am that like if apple i mean he went so far as to say like if apple's goal here is to just make network tv on streaming it will fail like like i get the apples so this is the this is the mystery is does tim cook come in and

say nope just family programming we don't want any of those things, which is like Jeff Bezos was like, I want the next Game of Thrones. It's like, okay, well, you know what's in Game of Thrones, right? Sex and violence and language. That's what's in annuity in Game of Thrones. All those things are in there.

Amazon don't already have content like that, though, anyway. Oh, yeah, they don't care. But this is what I'm saying is, you can't somebody could argue this point but i i would disagree with them i don't think you can go to creators who are going to create the very best content that's going to win you emmy awards and have everybody talking about your content and say you can do whatever you want as long as it's

something that would air on nbc i don't I don't think that's going to work for them because I think the creators want the freedom to do things that they feel are more realistic and yes, titillating, but also realistic portrayals of people saying bad words and having sex and being naked because people do those things, just not on network TV.

So I'm choosing for now to parse the recode statement that this is all about launch and promoting this service and trying to cast as wide a net as possible. But it will be interesting if Apple comes out with these shows and the take on them is that they're all kind of vanilla and boring. And I think it will limit Apple's ability to sign top tier creators if they say, again, we will give you lots of money, but your constraint is going to be that you have to be at a network TV level of standards and practices. I basically agree with everything you said. I think that this is their starting point. This is their free. This is the first taste type stuff. So they want to get everybody.

But they know they're not stupid. And they've brought in people that also know, that know better than anybody. They've hired great people, and you'd expect that those guys that they got from Sony, if they thought that they were just going to be making full a house, they probably wouldn't have come on board. I would expect they know the long-term plan um and that that it you know that it will then inform for

them later to make some more edgy niche content this report also did say that apparently tim cook got involved with an edit of carpool karaoke there was an episode that he delayed because there was some content that he delayed because there was some content that he was unhappy with and didn't think it was appropriate yeah well i'll tell you if the message that the tv executives go out to to the creatives in hollywood is um that tim cook is going to watch your show and uh and personally send demand edits because of adult content they're not going to sign anybody to deals who's any good it's right it's not going to happen so this is this is actually a um it's actually a harmful story for apple yep these stories hurt apple's attempts to get into this i would imagine

that privately these executives are spinning this and saying no no it's just for the launch and no no that was carpool karaoke is totally different and that's part of apple music and it's a different service and blah blah blah yeah like we weren't here then right like we won't that's not how it's gonna be it's gonna chill their conversations with with creators and and again i can hear somebody out there saying, come on, you can make a good show without nudity and violence and sex talk. It's like, well, you can. You can. And there are lots of them.

Right. But a lot of the greatest stuff pushes boundaries. And the people who are the most bona fide kind of star creators of content inwood want to push boundaries and make the most creative stuff that will win them accolades and awards and sanded off family-friendly content while it has a place and there's nothing wrong with it and i you know i i i watch a not a lot of it but i watch i watch some of that stuff i mean i watch I watch network TV stuff and it's fine, but that's not the stuff that the top notch of the industry are creating.

And I don't think Apple wants to go out with a product that is basically like, pay us $10 a month for more network shows. Like, I'm not sure how that sells. So that's their challenge is how do they... This comes back to the thing that you and I have talked about before is how is this going to roll out?

What are they going to do? And maybe now we have a little hint about that, which is they're going to have a first wave of shows that they want to have kind of broad appeal that'll get people to start to appreciate Apple's video efforts. And they'll do that as part of the launch, try to launch as broadly as possible,

maybe following the Apple music model. Maybe they give everybody six months of access to it. And then as that door is closing, um, they also ramp up with new original material that is, um, that is maybe racier on one end and also maybe like more, more targeted on other ends.

I mean, maybe more children's content, right? I mean, HBObo like we said last week hbo has sex and violence and nudity hbo also does sesame street like there is a broad range on hbo and apple could do that too from says from big birds to big dragons that's hbo that's what they're all about yeah i really was sad about that scene where, well, no, it's a spoiler. I'm not going to say about what happened to Big Bird. Poor Big Bird.

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Listeners of this show can get free overnight shipping to the US or Canada when you go to Eero.com, that's E-E-R-O.com, and use the promo code UPGRADE. That's Eero.com, promo code UPGRADE for free overnight shipping. We thank Eero for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, Jason, you've had the iPhone X for a week now. I want to know how and if your feelings have changed or evolved. Is there anything that's sticking out to you more than it did a week ago? Is there any opinions changed or reinforced with your time with the phone? So Face ID, the only failures that I've really had have involved me having something in front of my face, like the microphone right here.

That's something that I have to change if I want to flip open my phone while I'm on a podcast. I actually need to move away from the microphone just enough for it to see my face. You've got to get the Taze on Day move down. You know, you've got to move away from the microphone when you unlock. That's right.

It's just a thing you've got to do. I really love it. I love the screen. I love that it is edge to edge, you know, less than notch. The notch doesn't bother me at all. I don't really notice it. It's just part of the personality of the phone. I like the data up in the corners.

I always felt like the status bar was too crammed full of junk too often. I like the fact that it doesn't color the whole status bar now when you're in a particular, like, mode, like recording. the fact that it doesn't color the whole status bar now when you're in a in a particular like mode like recording it just kind of puts a an overlay or a like a background under the the um the time so like tethering and calling and screen recording it used to do the whole big drop down but now it just puts a little colored circle behind the time right so like it's a blue one for tethering and green for a call and red for screen recording yeah exactly so it's um it's it's this it's that sort of thing it's um it's all uh i'm just i'm just really liking it i i have found myself in instances where before i would have gone and gotten my ipad where i'm like

yeah i want to play with the iphone a little bit more. And it's just, it's been, it's been fun to use it. And, and yeah, I don't say, I don't think it's evolved very much in that my initial response was really positive and that I adapted to it very quickly. And that continues to be the case. It's nice to see new app updates come out. There are still a few apps that have been, you know, revved over the last week to fix issues with iPhone 10 compatibility, especially like midweek last week. All of the we need to get this out by Friday updates started to hit. So like I was using the previous version of the Slack app and it was just, you know, it was it was bars top and bottom. And so letterboxed, and then they pushed an update on Wednesday or something. It was like, Oh no, it fits. And it's just, it's nice when

that happens to, um, to get the full, uh, full screen use of the, of the 10, but no, I'm basically, I'm, I'm, I'm loving it. I did get my one that I bought cause I have the Apple review unit, which is a silver, but I got the space gray one that I bought. So I was able to kind of like compare the look of the two models, which is interesting. I think the space gray looks good, but not as good as I hoped. And the silver looks way better than I thought it would. probably choose the space gray anyway if i had to choose um one of them today to buy but um it's much closer than i thought because that that especially that shiny polished stainless steel on the silver one is beautiful and the fact that it's got the black front the black bezels because i never liked the white bezels and i'm glad that they're dead so i got a phone on friday i was able to get it oh the drama the drama you managed a day i was running all over town uh but i was able to get i have i have a silver one um which was what i wanted i wanted the silver uh it is

called silver i keep calling it white people keep correcting me it is silver and i will say that like the back of it is more silvery than the white has been on the front in the past. Right. It's not as it's not like bright white. It is more silvery. I mean, I had a PR person referred to it as iridescent. I don't I sort of called it kind of sparkly, but it definitely is a different than even than the 8 white background, silver background. And they said that although most of the layers of coating on the glass are the same as on the iPhone 8, there is an extra layer on the X on the back. And that's that iridescence layer that makes it just a little sparkly. I love this phone, Jason. I knew you would.

I love it. Plus Club, though, you're leaving the plus behind so i'm i'm interested in in getting to that too as a as a um as a change but go ahead go ahead so i have lots i have lots i have lots of points i have a whole list of points here comparing it to the plus but i need to set up a couple of things first so the overall design of this phone, I think it's my favorite iPhone design of all time. It has this like luxury, futuristic feeling to it that maybe hasn't been this way since the first one. Like whenever I use this phone and I look at it and I pick it up and like I feel it and I see the silver and the screen and it lights up and the beautiful screen is right there in front of me it honestly does feel like the future like and I know that it's the marketing line that Apple have used but it is such a huge jump from the previous iPhone there are so many little things about it that feel like huge just

huge advances it feels like the future for for iphone users you know and i know that some of this stuff and i bet this is the same when you when you upgraded your galaxy to the to the ones with the edge to edge screens right like there is just something about this i think it's more than a fad like these designs with the larger screens really advance these phones in interesting ways um and i just, you know, I've had it for like four days now. And every time I look at this thing, I am surprised again at how much I love the way it looks. I don't want to put this phone in a case.

I've bought AppleCare+. I have ordered the in-case frame and it's on the way, which is one of the bumpers I was talking about last week. I want to see what that's like. I have an Apple silicone case, which I've put in when I've left the house a couple of times, because even though I have AppleCare Plus, I feel like right now is the worst possible time to try and get an iPhone replaced. So, you know, I'm trying to be careful with it for the time being, but this phone screams to be caseless because it feels so great in the hand the glass feels amazing and the stainless steel frame is just so beautiful i don't want to cover it

doesn't look good yeah it really looks good and but the only thing is without the case is the camera bump is bonkers on this one it's huge like if you touch that foam it's on the table almost as a 180 flip like it's it's mad it is you know i phone it's on the table almost as a 180 flip like it's it's mad it is you know i mean i know the camera's big and they i think they made the bump a bit more of a design thing which when i look at it i actually like the design of it but using a phone on the table is tricky but it is actually yeah but to be honest i'm using it less on the table anyway because it's not as easy to unlock so I kind of pick it up anyway so I'm actually doing it less you can unlock it when it's on a table

but you have to kind of like look right over to it so I just find myself not doing that so much now usually the main event of our episodes where we get new iPhones is talking about the horrors of setup this one went great and I even made it tougher

than before. I was being tough on this phone, Jason. I decided to do a full iCloud restore, which is not how I usually restore. I usually restore via an iTunes backup, right? Because you're not pulling so much down from the cloud. But I thought to myself, this is how people actually do set up their new phones. They set them up with iCloud restores, right? So I thought to myself, I don't want to go easy on them. I want to make it as hard as it can possibly be because this is how everybody does it. You know, I'm setting up a new iPhone on iPhone release day via iCloud. And it was a little slow in some places, but overall worked great.

There were no huge hangups, no apps that I couldn't download. I wasn't waiting all afternoon for apps. I know that in the US, there were some problems with AT&T activation, but I had no problems here in the UK. I was really surprised at how well it worked. iOS 11 has made this so much better. I applaud Apple for listening to their customers

about how tough it has been to do this process because two huge things for iOS 11. One, where you hold one phone next to the other phone and it shares a bunch of settings, right? That was fantastic. So I didn't have to sign into a bunch of stuff. I didn't have to set up new Wi-Fi. Like that was all just shared.

And they have condensed the amount of screens in iOS 11 for setting up the phone. So, you know, there was like, hey, what about the suggested settings? And it just did it all for me, right? And it's not nice. Go in and change it. This was brilliant.

We very specifically complained about that. Yeah. And it was so good to see that that was a thing where they addressed their attention of like, do we need to ask them permission for all of these things? And so it's like, look, we could just go with the permissions you already granted instead of asking you again. It's like, yes, please do that. And it saves a lot of time and friction. The only thing that was weird for me was that I i had to install ios 11.1 during the setup process i've never done that before to my memory like that the phones didn't ship with the most

recent version i don't know what happened there maybe 11.1 was a little bit later than they expected or something yeah i i think some phones must have been manufactured before uh 11.1 was ready and so they ship with an earlier version and then just do an auto update or something like that that must have been a production line thing in order to keep the keep the phones flowing yeah you will not be surprised to know that the review units provided by apple were already updated to 11.1 i also um for me my watch swapped over automatically so when during the setup process they were like hey do you want to pair this watch to this phone and i was like sure and then at the end that i

had to do the thing with the uh you know you point the camera at the little thing and then it took like five or ten minutes and my watch was ready to go so that was perfect for me everything was fine i've seen a lot of people complaining that watches kind of went a bit awry, but I had no problems. It seemed that whatever the process, how it's supposed to be, for me this time, it worked that way. You know, maybe there's some conspiracy theory, right? Because we always complain about this stuff that maybe, you know, somebody adjusted my iCloud settings to make sure this wouldn't happen to me. But I say, Jason, this time I have no complaints about setup of this device.

So hats off to Apple because they've obviously made some big changes to that and it worked perfectly. Yeah, the last two years since we had our real unfortunate iPhone 6S setup experiences, Apple has made some great strides on the software side to make, it's not without its issues and people definitely ran into some things but you can see the the the trend here is that somebody somewhere

at apple said you know what setup's too hard setup's not this is i mean they probably said a similar thing to what we said two years ago which is this is supposed to be one of the happiest days of your year it's iphone upgrade day maybe you know for most people it's every two or three years where it's like you get a new iphone you're really excited and then you end up super frustrated and angry because of all of the weird things that happen when you update it should be delightful and over the last two years you know it's not perfect but they have really made a concerted effort to make it a more delightful and less painful upgrade process because it should right your first day with your new iphone should be happy not frustrating over a thousand dollars right like you should be able to sit down and play with the thing to their heart's content right i know like a lot of people

including me like i cleared my afternoon i was, I want to spend my afternoon playing with my new toy, and I got to. Now, okay, so Face ID, I think, is a lot of people talking about this as the big thing here. But for me, the screen. The screen is the biggest feature. This is the thing that I was most excited about, and it's the thing that I'm most impressed at. So with the notch, I barely ever pay attention to the notch. I forget that it's there. Every now and then I'll open an application that is all white. And then I see it as if it wasn't there before. It's very, very strange, right? So like I'm on

my home screen and just doing whatever. And I open like airmail, which is all white. And I'm like, oh, I don't know what it is is but in some places i just don't pay attention to it at all and i love the way that the the apps look when they're updated i love the way that it all just flows around it looks beautiful to me i was very surprised like i picked up my phone at one point and like my old phone my six 6 Plus, my 7 Plus. 7 Plus. I had a 7. 7 Plus.

7 Plus. And the squared corners looked out of date, which was really weird. Like I picked it up and I was like, huh. I'd only been using it for a few hours, but there was just something about it. Like the squared corners looked old now. You know, there's always that thing, right? That like as soon as there's a new Apple product, the old one looks decrepit.

And for me, that was it. It was the square corners. It was like it immediately stuck out to me as a thing that looked old. Very strange. I love True Tone. Love True Tone on all my devices. And I think True Tone makes screens look so wonderful.

And I am so happy to have it on my iPhone now because like paired up with the the wide color stuff and the OLED screen like this screen just looks incredible but part of the screen stuff part of the overall size of the phone for me obviously comparing it to the plus is a big point I have been a long proponent of the plus from the six and the seven and I would have been about the eight you know if that was a phone that i would have got that's what i would have got i have you know plus club it's a big thing for me i am totally fine with the 10. huh all right so what did you get from the plus and what do you did you feel like you give up something

or do is it giving you enough of what you got from the Plus that it doesn't matter? So one of the big reasons for me why I got the Plus and stuck with the Plus is information density. I was looking to get as much information on the screen as possible because a lot of what I'm doing on my devices is related to work, right? So like emails and messages and, you know, when I'm relaxing, I'm reading tweets, you know, like it's stuff like that. And honestly, like I've done some tests, like just side by side looking at it. You can see just as much or more on screen in these applications on the 10 than you can on the plus.

So in an email, I can see more emails. I can see one more email in email. In my message threads, I see one more message on the 10. In Twitter, in Tweetbot, I see more. In Notes, I see a little bit more. The only time that I've had a situation where I saw less was using the keyboard in Notes. I would see one less line. So in everything that I tried, I got the same result, like I could see just the same amount of information and I can't on the 10

than I could on the plus I know that landscape mode is more condensed but I never used landscape mode, like I never used it except for video and honestly watching video on the 10 is perfectly fine I have no problems

with that at all it's a big enough screen for that stuff so the landscape mode doesn't bother me like i i can feel that this phone is smaller and i noticed it on the keyboard but i've gotten i have adapted to the smaller keyboard significantly faster than i would have expected i think for me personally it's it's actually nicer because i use geoboard and i mostly swipe with one hand i use like a swipe typing it's easier to do swipe typing on a on a narrower phone but even when i'm typing normally like i have adapted to that part quicker than i would have expected you know like a couple of days and it didn't feel small to me anymore but i think for me like this phone gives me what i wanted from the plus i have a

better camera you know i have the great camera and i have the space you know the space to see all the stuff that i want to see the jury's still out on battery for me like i don't feel like i've really gotten a good sense of the battery life um but all phone battery life is bad right like there's i'm never happy um so as long as it can give me what you know so far i feel like i'm getting just as much but i i really i need to do more like concerted tests but in regards to the screen size like it's fine it feels perfect for me like i have no problems with it at all well that's i mean this is the i'm trying to understand it's inside the mind of the iphone plus user right like what you got out of it versus what you get out of this um

it's interesting yeah i mean and from from my perspective like i said last week i get stuff like the dual camera which you know if you had gone down it's not just it's not just what are you giving up um in going down in size it's also what you are not giving up that you previously would have to go down in size like the dual camera so it's a little bit of both and as david asked in the chat room right like isn't there less space overall isn't this a different size class look i i struggle to really understand a lot of the way that these screens match up like some people say it's bigger some people say it's smaller like it seems to be a bit of a crapshoot depending on what statistic you're looking at so I decided to make my test a real world test I looked at lists

and in lists which is what I'm looking at most of the time lists of things lists of information I'm seeing the same amount of stuff so that that's what I want. Like, I don't need the screen to be huge. I just need to get a lot of stuff on the screen. And I'm using the same settings for dynamic type and all of that stuff. And I'm getting what I'm looking for, right? Like, I'm not, I don't feel like I'm losing space, right? The only place where I feel that way is when I'm using an application that isn't optimized for the X, because then I'm just using like a iPhone 8 sized application, and I really feel it then. But most of the apps, like the vast majority of apps that I use on my phone

with any frequency have been updated, and they look fine. So your mileage is going to vary on this depending on what you like a Plus phone for, but all of my uses of a Plus phone are taken care of with this screen. So I've noticed a bunch of changes to iOS. One of them, one of my favorites actually, is the Taptic feeling on the flashlight and camera buttons

on the cover sheet it feels like the home button it's wild like i don't know if you've felt this but like it feels just like clicking the old home button it has the exact same feeling to me yeah you're right which is genius because it's like that's all it was right like it was just the taptic feedback and they've done it on there like oh wow like you click it and it just feels like there's a button going down and i'm very impressed with that and i like just clicking them i just i do i click the flashlight on and off now because it's just a funny little feeling to me but yeah i've i was very surprised about that the new gestures um the home gesture and the multitasking gesture i've gotten used to

those really quickly quicker than i would have thought um i have noticed uh just just a slight pain in my thumb um but i'm not surprised by that because one i've been using the phone way more than normal and two there's just a new gesture that i need to get used to this is not abnormal for me you know maybe i have bad hands but when I change a thing like this, it just takes a little while for my hands to get used to the change. I'll give a top tip to people. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding or like a lot of different ways that people think that you activate the multitasking, right? Like I've seen like a million different ways of how you do it. To me, the one that I found the best is just swipe up

and hold for a second anywhere on this, like from the bottom. You don't have to go all the way up to the top. You don't have to go from the left hand corner to the right hand corner. Just swipe up from the middle and hold for a second. And then you get the multitasking view pop up. Nice and simple. Like that's worked great for me. I don't know about you, Jason. I never had a problem with it. Once I realized the gesture is essentially just swipe. I never had a problem with it. Once I realized the gesture is essentially just swipe your thumb up and hold it. Yeah. Like that's all that happened. And it worked fine.

It's funny. You remind me. One of the things that I have noticed that you asked about earlier on is so I went to a college football game this weekend. And I took some pictures with the 10. And I, you know, telephoto lens, and then I zoomed in. So I use a digital zoom above the telephoto lens zoom on that camera to get these pictures from the stands of the football game. And they are really good, like shockingly good, even zoomed in where I would think, oh, well, it's a digital zoom. It's going to be really awful. They actually look really good. And so I just, it was one of those moments where I took a bunch of pictures and realized just how good this camera

is, especially since it, as somebody who's coming from never having had the telephoto lens. So, you know, as being able to zoom in that much further and still have that much sort of like initial quality uh very i was very impressed with that it's great right just just throwing it just throwing it on the uh on the pile and you know it's funny you mentioned the thumb swipe up gesture and we're talking about multitasking i'll tell you the part that actually has really compromised me is on the ipad because the ipad is like a half step in ios 11 where it's kind of like the ios gestures on iphone 10 but kind of not yeah and what i found is i really just want the iphone 10 gestures on my ipad now like i want to i want to swipe up and get, you know, swipe up to home, swipe up and hold to get to a, you know, multitasking. I like having control center

there on the swipe up, but I find myself in that weird position now where like there is a swipe up gesture on the iPad. So I do it and then the doc pops up and I'm like, oh, right. Yeah. And then I can do, you know, I can usually just hop over to another app there. But this is going to be interesting in terms of how I build kind of a model in my mind of like interacting with the iPhone versus interacting with the iPad because the rules are different on both now with iOS 11 and the iPhone 10. Well, I mean, Face ID, right? Like, that's a big one. Well, that's true, too. That's true, too.

Having to put my finger on the uh but but i i assume that in the next if if not in 2018 then in 2019 the ipad will be updated to do face id the ipad pro will be updated to do face id and will probably and probably drop a would not surprise me if it drops the home button and goes to these gestures as a part of a revamp of the iPad Pro. And the advantage to that will be that the behaviors will be the same because it is a little bit weird to do that. I just learned the swipe up gesture in two forms for my iPad. And now I've learned them for the iPhone and they're different. But related.

That's the interesting thing is that you can tell, I mean, so much of the story of these things is the, the groundwork that's been laid. I saw somebody, somebody tweeted about this this week. And I, I, I nodded my head.

Cause I think I wrote a Mac world article about this that said the same thing, which is like raised to wake is the perfect example of like that. How is that? Not like that's a feature that exists because they knew Face ID was coming. They have spent a couple of years overhauling unlock status, making you be able to unlock the phone without pressing the button in in order to tap on notifications or swipe to widgets. widgets like it's hard not to look at this as part of a larger project project that culminates in face id because now all of that stuff has paid off when you can when you can raise the phone to wake it and then look at it and unlock it and then be at that screen and choose whether to stay there

or not they all go together like i i use raise to wake all the time now that's that's how it's it's basically raised to unlock your phone. They've been laying this groundwork for a couple of years in iOS. I miss the battery percentage indicator. Honestly, I would prefer to just be able to replace the battery icon with a percentage number. The little icon doesn't work for me like i like the percentage and i don't like control center i don't like where it is i don't like the way that you pull it down now i don't like the animation like the animation is really weird it seems to come up from the

bottom over there it's like a very there's a lot about control center that i'm not a big fan of right now um and i'm waiting to see how that kind of shakes out but overall i don't like the changes there to be honest i agree i find myself getting frustrated where maybe i'll get over it but i have those moments of like oh right control center yep um and and i realize i have to you know not use i'm in one mode where i'm just sort of like holding it in my left hand and using my thumb and then i'm like oh but i can't do that i have to i have to go and swipe up from the top and bring it down and it's it's just a different kind of mode and you're right it's a weird um effect because it like fades in as you swipe down like the old the old status bar comes down with it um which is which is really weird uh and and i i yeah i miss having it more easily

accessible so i love face id um i found that you know a lot of times you you do wait a little bit longer uh maybe then it would be for touch id but it feels better like it just feels better like i pick up my phone and i look at it, and then it unlocks. Or, like, I open 1Password and don't have to, like, move my thumb down again. It just feels right to just press the app and just look at it, and then it opens up. Like, I found that to be a more natural, nicer-feeling way of doing authentication, rather than every time I need to authenticate something, I have to push my

phone my thumb and like hold and wait like it just feels right the animation pops up it tells me it's done and it goes through like i really like all of that um and i like some of the changes that it's brought as well like the automatic hiding of notification content is awesome um i like the i've never done that before i've always had my notification show because i don't want to be unlocking all the time. But now just whenever I look at my phone, they just pop out and I really like it. And also something that's amazing for me,

I've said already on the show, I use Gboard all the time, right? Like I don't have Apple's keyboard installed. I just use Gboard, which is Google's keyboard. And when I would reply to things like messages from Notification Center prior to getting the iPhone X, I would get,

I wouldn't be able to use Gboard because the phone's locked. So I would get this, like, an Apple keyboard without autocorrect is how it would work. It was kind of frustrating a lot of the time, but it was just one of the trade-offs. But now, because my phone unlocks whenever I look at it, i reply to messages from notification center i get to use

gboard which is awesome it's a little thing for me that's made my experience way better because i'm able to use the keyboard that i like and use and that knows all of my autocorrect and all that sort of stuff from the notifications because the phone's on lock now whenever I look at it. And one other thing, like, if Face ID fails on me, I don't get frustrated with it the way I would get frustrated with Touch ID because in the back of my mind, I know that every time I put my passcode in, I'm training the Face ID system, right? Like, this all came out a few weeks ago. You know, Apple kind of explained how they're working with this,

that if Face ID fails, but there is a percentage where it thinks it might be you, if you enter in your passcode, it will add to the data points that Face ID is collecting to make the system better overall. So every time I do it, I'm like, okay, like I know I'm doing this now, but by putting this time in,

like I'm training the system, right? That's been a weird kind of feeling for me, but I'm like, okay, like it's this time in, like I'm training the system, right? I was, that's been a weird kind of feeling for me, but I'm like, okay, like it's going to get better. I love Animoji, obviously. Yeah, we need to talk about Animoji. We sure do. I mean, Animoji is exactly what I wanted it to be. I'm having a great time with it.

But Harry McCracken started an incredible thing called Animoji Karaoke, and it has sweeped Twitter over the last few weeks where people are creating just these wonderful videos of Animoji characters singing along to music. And there are just a million fantastic examples of this, and they're so much fun, and I am loving watching them. You've even made one or two. I made a couple. The first thing I did was I sang along to the robot or not theme as the robot and i posted that in slack i don't think i posted that on twitter

you sent that to me as well in in yeah that's it that's it that's what i did and then i um i did uh a 10 second thing of uh get lucky by daft punk as sung by the robot because it felt like an appropriate thing and then of course, what happened is that this definitely gained momentum. And the optimal way to do it is you go to full screen mode in Animoji in Messages, where you tap on the little arrow up and it expands to full screen where the top half is all the Animoji and the bottom half is the different choices for which character. And you do a screen recording. And then you can just go forever instead of just 10 seconds. It doesn't record your audio,

but it'll record and then you overlay with the original music or whatever. And so not to be limited to singing, I acted out a scene from Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, where Khan, who is a chicken, taunts Captain Kirk, who is a fox. It's very good.

I did that. It's very good. I did some acting. I haven't done any of these yet, but I'm not ruling it out. I probably will do something, some fun stuff with it. I love it.

I'm sending them to everybody. I'm sending the video clips. I'm sending stickers. I'm having just a great time with Animoji. There are some cool features to Animoji that are not necessarily obvious. And Jason, you wrote a great article on Tom's Guide, which I'm going to put in the show notes about how to use Animoji in full. I didn't know the full screen thing was there. And a lot of people don't know that you can actually turn them into stickers. So it's worth looking over that guide it's actually it's a really good guide that you put together yeah you do a do a funny face and then tap on the face and drag it up and it's a

sticker or tap on it just tap on it and it will insert a still or you can record for 10 seconds so you don't have to do the 10 seconds with audio endlessly looping thing if you think that's annoying you can also just do a funny face and drag it in and you've got a sticker which is cool yeah apple stumbled across uh like a gold mine like this this animoji karaoke thing is is gonna sell iphones like i remember do you remember i said i believed animoji would be an iphone seller like in the same way that photobooth was i think that this is the thing right like people making these little videos like i expect to see maybe before ios 12 or at least in ios 12 some more ways to use animoji on the iphone as well

as of course there will be more characters like there will be uh i would be very surprised if we didn't see like buzz lightyear or something oh that's interesting well they've got right just that you could do a face map of a of an existing animated character too that's and they've got the pixar kind of deals or or mickey mouse maybe you know what why they won't do that you know why those won't happen is because people will make them say terrible things that's a possibility right and that's the mickey mouse there's a famous famous uh harlan ellison story about how his first day on the lot at disney working a job at disney he um was in the cafeteria and and loudly because he's a loud and by all accounts annoying person was doing a

mickey mouse a dead-on mickey mouse impression and having mickey mouse's voice say horrible things and he was fired immediately like that's right so there's the like brand brands of so so buzz lightyear may not be available but emoji don't belong to no one and so perhaps we will see more variations on emoji i also keep thinking like the smiley face and all of its variants you could you know you you could do that yeah it'll be interesting to see if they if they ride this a little bit further or if everybody is done with this even if even if this is this blows over in a week or a month it's great publicity for the iphone 10 and uh that that is you you, you can't, you can engineer some publicity. We talked about that last week with Apple's sort of PR plan for the iPhone 10. Some of this stuff, though, you

just have to hope it happens. And I would bet people at Apple were thinking people are going to really like this. They're going to, the internet's going to find fun ways to do this. And I don't think we've gotten to the end of it, right? I think this is going to keep going. I would be surprised if we don't see some late night talk shows like using this to do things too just as a you know again trying to be kind of current and and of the moment exactly so i think yeah we're gonna it's good for apple though ultimately um and i had fun being chicken con buried alive i love i absolutely love it it's such a great feature but it's fun it is it is something of the fun for me overall i love it i love this iphone so much i'm so happy with it it's really good you know i i feel like the last few years iphone releases have been you

know they've been cool but not like they haven't blown me away you know everything is iterative iterative with the iPhone, you know, most of the time. And you get that moment, like the 6 was really different. And then you get 6.1, which was the 6X, 6.2, which was the 7, 6.3, which is the 8, essentially. And the same way with like the 5 and the 5S, or you could argue the 4, 4S, 5 and 5S were kind of all the same phone oh no i would say that there would been bigger jumps right so like you know the 3g whatever it was new but then we went to the four which is amazing then you know there's one more iteration and the five got bigger right so it's like oh the screen's bigger and then the six got bigger still and there was the like i said it's arguable the five is sort of a stretched four so you could argue it but yeah that was a bigger

change because the screen size actually physically changed for the first time um and you know and you throw retina in there that was a big i would say a huge improvement but so much of it is that they have the cameras better every year and you know there are other features that are better every year and if you buy a phone every year it's just kind of this this march if you buy it every two or three years it's more dramatic which is great and that's what happened with lauren's phone like she she's gone up three years worth of iphone hardware and it's great and she loves it the iphone 8 she loves it but the 10 is a big jump and it's a bigger jump than we've had since the six which was a while ago now it's like forever ago so so yeah so that that um i was prepared to think it was weird and a first attempt i was really kind of stealing myself myself to being like it's expensive and

it's weird and it's maybe not maybe a year too early um all of those things i was kind of like preparing myself for as i got into it and i felt none of that i just it feels incredibly polished and a great piece of solid piece of hardware um it looks great it feels great it's fun to use it like they really nailed it i i when i saw renee richie's review which posted the same time i did and he basically said like it's the best Apple product ever or something like this. This is wildly hype, hype ish headline. Right. And,

but I was like, yeah, they, they, they, they, they killed it with this product. Like,

I'm not going to say best product ever, because I feel like that's, you lapse into potential like self parody when you do that. But this is, they got this one, like this is a winner. They, they did a good job with this product.

This is one of those that you go like job with this product this is one of those that you go like oh yeah this is sort of like how we felt about the airpods last year where it's like oh yeah this is like this is apple doing everything that apple can do on a new product today's episode is brought to you by encapsula they will help you delight the visitors to your website whilst also frustrating those fiendish attackers all because of their bulletproof security options and fast content delivery network. Right now, somewhere in the world, a website is being attacked. Some criminal is using giant botnets to scrape the content,

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check it out now to find out more about what Encapsular can do for you and claim that free month. Give Encapsular a try. You're not going to regret it. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. Jason Snell, it was earnings time. This one came out of the blue for me.

I didn't even know there was so much going on. I'd forgotten that there was an earnings call coming up. So I was at Dan Morin's house last week in Boston and he was like, hey, are earnings happening soon? And I was like, oh geez, I hope they're not happening like tomorrow. And it was, oh no, they're happening next Thursday. Of course they are. The day before the iPhone 10 comes out,

the week of the embargoed reviews and all of that, just throw in Apple's quarterly earnings. So, you know, this is how I spend my afternoon once every three months, which is making charts and transcribing analyst calls and writing stories. Great job you do, Jason. A great job you do.

I killed it on the transcription this time. I used an online transcription tool and broke it up into little parts and I think I beat everybody out with my transcript so that that mattered mattered for a good 30 minutes but uh but yeah i did that and uh it's fun it's good to refer to that and then all the pretty charts too so uh good quarter for apple like their this is their fiscal fourth quarter and it's kind of a sleepy quarter i think

it's their their smallest of all their quarters um but it is uh it was a record fourth quarter they made 52.6 billion dollars in revenue and from a a financial perspective because this is the one time i turn on like cnbc every three months is to see sort of like what are the analysts saying uh and the wall street people are saying and they say lots of stupid things is the answer they say a lot of things oh i don't know about this new iphone and uh they say that every year and they're wrong every time and uh but this time the the way the stock market works right it's all about the future it's futures trading you're basically like betting on where the company's going to go in the future and if the company says we're going to have a great quarter then the stock

goes up because that becomes new information that's in there and but but then they they predict what they're going to say and the stock sort of like builds based on the prediction uh so it's it's you know it's a whole thing but they the apple guidance which is apple saying here's how much money we're going to make next quarter the holiday quarter which is the biggest quarter for apple every year. And they did their predictions, the analysts did, and then Apple, which is notoriously kind of conservative in their estimation of what their next... They very rarely say it's a big number and then they don't meet it.

They meet their guesses. Apple's estimate for what they're going to make next quarter during the holidays was way above the analysts. So they liked that. And it would be a record Apple holiday quarter by quite a bit, actually. And Apple seems quite confident, maybe a little less confident than in the past because they definitely have some new things with this iPhone X and iPhone 8 being out there. But they seem quite confident that next quarter will be their biggest quarter of all time.

So let's break down some of what happened in financial Q4, and then we can talk a little bit more about that because that is really interesting. The future. So the iPhone,hone 55 of the revenue for the company iphone 8 sales exceeded expectations um luca is what was what is luca's first name uh luca is his first name oh okay yeah he's luca maestri he is the maestri that's the cfo okay luca luca maestri does not sleep with the fishes. That's Luca Brasi from the Godfather. You know what? That's why I had to ask you because I just hear Brasi in my head.

I'm so sorry, Luca. Luca Brasi. Mr. Maestri. Maestri. I think I noted that since the 8 and the 8 Plus went on sale that they became the two most popular iPhone models and have been every week since then, like of all time, which is wild. been every week since then like of all time so which is why that is a direct that is a direct attack on the uh some analyst report that said that the iphone 7 was selling better than the iphone 8 that's what that's about right okay so they instantly became the most popular is what they're saying yeah yeah the 7 did not stay above them they immediately became the most popular and

have continued to be so that they were really batting down without mentioning it they were batting down a very specific report that the iphone 8 sales were weak and that the 7 sales were actually better than the 8 which was based on a bunch of numbers that were really dumb and that everybody looked at and said really that doesn't seem right and then apple's like yeah it's it's totally not bogus not right the the iphone 8 plus is the best selling today of any of the Plus models, which surprised Apple. Yeah, this is once again, I love when they admit that they were surprised. And they did that a couple of times in this call. And this was one of them, which is the iPhone 8 Plus selling,

presumably in its mix with the 8, the best selling Plus model to date. And that they weren't really anticipating it to do that well. And it shows strength in, right? Because them being surprised means that despite all of their analysis they've got, which is way more than anybody on the outside has, they still can be surprised by demand for certain products. And the plus, the 8 plus definitely did that i mean if i was going to put on my analyst hat for a moment i would expect it's because the plus is not the top of the line anymore it's the middle and that people are just drawn to that

like it now sits in the middle i have a very important question what does your analyst hat look like does it have like a propeller on top that was exactly what i was thinking of actually that it was one of those hats with the propellers on the top it says analyst on the front and there's a propeller on top and that propeller is is to help me shoot up the charts um production is ramping up on the 10 they're making more and more of them at a rate that they're attempting to make more and more of them all the time right like that's cut you know they're like yeah okay we're gonna keep making them he said we don't know when they're going to be in balance or not but uh they always say that honestly they're they're always kind of struggling with how they get into supply demand balance

of a new product and what they didn't say is we anticipate really limited demand and therefore we're not going to be able to sell very many in the holiday quarter and in fact their estimates for margins and for uh profits in the holiday quarter suggest And in fact, their estimates for margins and for profits in the holiday quarter suggest that they think the iPhone 10 is going to sell pretty well, as are the 8 and the 8 Plus in the holiday quarter. So this is them showing some confidence in their ability to fill the supply chain. And we've seen that. The phone is not backordered until January or February at this point. Even now, you can still get, I believe, the iPhone X in December, and they still show up in stores. So they are doing a pretty good job

of fulfilling demand and ramping up. And the fact that your iPhone required a software update suggests that they've been building these things for a while in order to get a big pile of them to sell at launch. The other thing that they said that they aren't sure about, which I think was, again, telling, is this fact that they're selling the 8, 8 Plus, and the 10. And somebody asked them, like, what does that mean in terms of the mix of your sales? And are you going to suppress sales of the 8 for the 10?

Or is the 10 going to make people defer to later and all of that? And Tim Cook said, you know, we've thought about it a lot we've got some ideas this is this is our best guess but we've never done this before and he actually kind of laughed he was like we've never done this before so we'll see like there was an admission there at least a little bit that apple which is which likes to have everything wired everything locked down like here's what's going to happen we know what's going to happen we're experts we got this they're like We're experts. We got this. They're like, yeah, the 10, the eight, eight plus the 10, we don't really know how that's going to go. We're confident, but we could be taken by surprise. And that's, they are more likely to disclose that in a financial context, right?

Because they are trying to provide financial analysts with an understanding of the risks going forward and the limits of their knowledge and what they're able to project. But as people who follow the products like we do, it's still interesting information that they're not quite sure how it's going to do. Because we talked about what a gamble this is on one level, to kind of take this machine that makes money, on one level to kind of take this machine that makes money, which is the iPhone and change how it runs by having this extra product in the product line at the high end. And, uh,

you know, this is them saying, we think it's going to do well, but we don't exactly know. The iPad. Second quarter with a sales increase. Yes. iPad not dead for the second straight quarter.

Isn't that nice? So excited. So excited. 10.3 million units beaten 9.3 from the quarter before. And the best part of this, the very best part of this, is that the average selling price took a bump up, which is a very, very good thing. Because last quarter, the average selling price went down. And what it indicated was that the increase in unit sales for the iPad year on year was because there was pent-up demand for a cheap, regular $329 iPad.

That they were going into education, and the fear was that's what people wanted and the pros they didn't care about. The average selling price going up means that the 10.5 did its job and I'm so freaking happy because the iPad is on the rise, proving, proving that if you put the effort into the product as they have with hardware and software in the last 12 months, you will sell them. And this is really, really good news for people like me and you who love and use our iPads. I'm so excited about it. Yeah, it is. Just put this in context. What was it? 13 straight quarters, 12, 13 straight quarters of year over year unit decline, followed by two straight quarters of more than 10% of double-digit unit growth year-over-year.

It's going to be interesting to see how the holidays shake out. And will they be able to go year-over-year? Because that will mean that they'll need a bigger bump because the holiday sells a lot of iPads. So how will that do? because the holiday sells a lot of iPads. So how will that do? I'm more inclined to believe that they will grow year over year in the holiday quarter too because it feels like they've righted the ship here a little bit.

That they hit bottom and now they're in a growth path and it may not be an exponential growth path, but even if that iPad grows 10% to 15% a year, they're moving in the right direction. Or even stabilizes you know that's all we really wanted was just stability you know like the mac continues stability right and we'll talk about that in a moment because there's some interesting stuff there too but you know the mac is relatively stable the ipad was just falling falling falling

so stability and increase i mean it's amazing like i could have i dreamt for sales increases honestly like all i was really hoping is that it would just stop falling um and this is just fantastic news i'll also point out the revenue last quarter year over year revenue increase for the ipad you mentioned asp which is absolutely true like they're selling more ipad pros the 10.5 ipad pro is driving a lot of the sales increase where it was last quarter, it was that cheap iPad. And so last quarter, year over year, unit sales went up 15%, but revenue only went up 2%.

This quarter, they were up 11% in units and 14% in revenue. So you can see it in a couple different places that this is a good story so second straight quarter of good story for the ipad but that story was about the cheap ipad and this quarter story is about the ipad pro doing well so yeah ipad fans thumbs up uh it was good it was a good result 2017 was the best year of sales ever for the Mac. Who would have thought that? Who would have best guessed that one? The fourth

quarter was the best quarter increase of all of them. 5.4 million units compared to 4.9 million the year before. Apple said that they sold more Macs in China than they ever have before in mainland China. ASP is up. And Apple suggested this is all due to the MacBook Pro.

Yeah, this is basically because this is not, as far as I can tell, the best year for the Mac in terms of units. But it is in terms of revenue. units but it is in terms of revenue and uh the reason for that is um the macbook pro right it's that that's a more expensive computer that they that they sold a lot of them and it's more expensive and so the average selling price went up and the revenue went up so So they averaged $6.5 billion in revenue per quarter in fiscal 2017. So that's healthy. That's the most that they've, in my charts, that's the most they've ever done in a four-quarter average is $6.5. So that's good. That is their best of the year.

In 2015, they did $6.4. They were close. Units, they're down at one point at the end of 2015. Again, they sold about 5.15 million Macs per quarter for that year. And it's 4.82 this time. So they're coming off of a high in 2015, like they are with so many other products right like the iphone especially but still it's a good it's a good mac year like they said it's the best in terms of mac revenue um it's a 25 year over year change in mac revenue it's four straight quarters of mac revenue growth growth. So I, as a glass half full person, I say, look, the Mac is a good and growing business and new Macs drive Mac sales. I can see how a glass half empty person would say, one,

if you don't like the MacBook Pro, you look at this and you're like, what do you mean? I hate that thing. Why is that driving Mac sales? I could argue because it's the MacBook Pro and people are going to buy it because they need a MacBook Pro. They need a Pro Mac laptop. And maybe they care about the stuff you care about, about the keyboard and USB-C and all that, but they still need to buy it. And maybe they don't care. But it's been a business success. I would also say the glass half empty person might say um well geez if it the product is successful maybe they should pay more attention to it but i feel like we had that moment with the round table that was sort of like okay we hear you and we've seen some behavior on apple's part in terms of updating macs more frequently like the macbook pro got a got a speed bump at some point. And we've also seen that the Mac after, you know, after a down

year, like the iPhone has had a good growth year this year. So I'm choosing to be hopeful that the more the Mac grows, and the fact that Apple is paying more attention to the Mac, this is good for the future of the Mac, especially when you talk, as they mentioned in the analyst call, that the PC market contracted. And so Apple gained market share. And that is always, I think Marco made this point on ATP last week,

is you can say that the Mac is boring and the PC market is boring because it's a market that is contracting. But you could also say that it's a huge opportunity and that Apple could double Mac sales if it wanted to because the PC market is boring and contracting, but Mac sales are growing. So they could steal even more PC sales away and convert those people to Mac users. And you can still get a growth business for quite a while in a market that's contracting and uh so yeah i'm i think this is really great news as good as the ipad news is because it's sort of like off death's door um

the mac news is also really good because after 2016 you could have looked at it and said okay the bottom fell out of the mac it's just going to be flat from now on. And that's not the case. In fact, it's accelerated this quarter. Apple Watch and wearables are growing. We don't have data on this specifically. We know that Apple Watch saw a 50% growth year on year and that the overall category is up 75% year on year, probably also including AirPods. But that's as much as we get statistics-wise. There's no revenue, there's no units, nothing built into

this right now. Right. They used these no-details-just-growth numbers to say Apple Watch, they said third consecutive quarter of growth that I assume is year-over-year, but that's good. You can do some solving for X and sort of figure out what the Apple Watch

growth is really, and sort of figure out what the Apple Watch growth is really. And some of the analysts have done that. And I think they've done a good job. As much as I joke about the Bezos chart of we don't really know. It's just Tim Cook says stuff. You can get a sense. And they have said, yeah, three consecutive quarters of 50% year-over-year growth is good. That's really good.

Like that's better than any other product in Apple's product line. And it's a small number, which is why it can grow so fast, but it's still growing. The Apple Watch is not... Every now and then I see somebody like, oh, the Apple Watch, that's stupid. And it's like, well, okay, but look, they're growing that business 50% year-over-year every quarter at this point. That's a pretty good sign that it's doing well. And that their wearables is up 75% year over year says airpods are doing really well too and i like how they class classify those together as wearables like this is their message to wall street especially is like we're in wearables like this

is this is a an ongoing thing and it's not just one product we're we're going to make little computers that you put on your wrist or stick in your ears or who knows where else they might go maybe in your analyst hat we'll see apple propellers uh services are at an all-time high 8.5 billion dollars in revenue up from 6.3 the year before that is a huge jump and uh luca maestri not brazi said that apple music has turned the corner whatever that means but we can assume that what that means is they got a lot more subscribers in the in this quarter so services is up and everyone's happy they're getting money from all all this is the yeah this is the product because it's weird because it's services and not a physical product and so it changes how you have to think

about apple's business but it is the the think about Apple's business. But it is the part of Apple's business that is growing like the iPhone grew in the early days, like the iPad grew in the early days, where it just, it's like a machine. It just keeps on growing. And Apple has said they wanted to double their services revenue from, you know, from 2015 or 2016, maybe by 2020, they expected to double it and they are on their way to doing that. And the Wall Street people, the money people love that. If you're focused on Apple as a hardware company,

services is weird and different. And we talked about Apple video service earlier, but this is all still a huge part, a huge component of their business and is growing dramatically and apple music stuff they mentioned uh they gave an update to that which luca has been doing for the last few quarters because once they launched apple music they admitted that the itunes sales were dropping they didn't talk about it before then but then they're like yeah you know itunes music

sales have been dropping um but what they said this time was that it's turned the corner, that their music segment is now growing again for the first time. And that's because they still have iTunes music sales revenue, but their Apple music is growing enough. I read between the lines and said it's growing enough to offset the loss of a la carte music sales. And so they've got a growing music business again. And then looking forward to q1 so as jason mentioned um this the apple are forecasting a like just a storm of a quarter a guidance of 84 to 87 billion dollars for the quarter which would be between $5.6 to $8.6 billion more than last year.

If they do this, this will be the company's largest year-over-year jump of all time, beating the $17 billion increase from 2013 to 2014 Q1. So Wall Street is understandably freaking out over this because it's such a huge amount of money the record quarter for iphone sales is 78.2 million i wonder if they're going to beat that too i assume so right like if if you're going to drive 5.6 to 8.6 billion dollars more revenue that's got to come from iphones right uh primarily right but i think they would imagine that all their products will sell iPhones, right? Primarily. Right? But I think they would imagine that all their products will sell better. But I think

they're anticipating a huge number of iPhones sold. Eight. Because the eight only was out for a short time in this quarter. In the past quarter. So most of that is going to be here. And the iPhone X is going to be in here. So that's a huge part of it. I should say, I'm not quite sure

where that like the biggest jump thing comes from because in holiday 14, they did 57 billion, basically 58 billion. I got it from your article. They did 75. Well, no, it's the biggest jump they've taken in a while, not ever because the jump from 2014 to 2015 was enormous. That was when the iPhone kind of went supersonic.

They went from $58 billion to $75 billion. That was bananas. That was recent history, then, is a better way to say it. I misread. But the last three have been incremental. The last three holiday quarters have been 74.6, 75.9, 78.4. And,

and so I think it would have been reasonable for wall street to say, okay, this is the new normal with apple. They'll hit 80. And I think that's basically what they did is they're like, yeah, it'll be 80. And apple's like,

nope, it's going to be between 84 and 87. And the wall street's like, oh my God, what, what is what? And presumably, you know, the stock went up and all those things too. So it's quite a bold prediction on their part, even though they admit they don't entirely

know what's going to happen with the iPhone. They're still confident enough. And they generally hit in that range. So I think where we will look at a 60, you know, 86, 87 billion revenue quarter, which is bananas, right? billion revenue quarter which is bananas right and that's that's keeping in mind that four years ago their holiday quarter was 58 to be like 30 billion more in a few years time they may hit 100 per quarter oh yeah i mean if you look if you look at their their holiday quarter revenue numbers uh in in what is it in uh the 2010 holiday quarter it was 26.7 oh god wow wow that is wild and so as we move to the end of the decade they're they're closing in on 90

um yeah it's it's this is one of those things where I post these charts and people are like, yep, Apple's totally doomed. Like again, Apple is not free from criticism just because it's making money. And there are lots of people who criticize it and rightly so.

And their products and strategies all should be analyzed carefully. No one can deny that Apple is just printing money at this point. It is a massively profitable and a huge revenue driver No one can deny that Apple is just printing money at this point. Just it is a massively profitable and a huge revenue driver is just a huge company making huge amounts of money. Today's show is also brought to you by Casper. Casper are the company focused on sleep, and they're dedicated to making you exceptionally

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Mayor asked, if Apple knew that the iPhone X supply could be limited, why did they include more countries than usual on launch day? For example, India is usually not included, but it was this time. So I had some thoughts about this, Jason. We were concerned, and it does look like the supply was maybe not as limited as we'd feared, but still limited, right? So if supply is limited, why include more countries? I expect it's because they want to show the same commitment to their growing market in india as they did with china like apple want india to be their next big major market so they should treat it as such and you show it respect you show the market respect by giving them the device on day

one right yeah i think so and i think apple i think this is one of the ways that apple pushes itself is apple wants to roll out internationally everywhere. You see a lot of tech companies, they roll out in one country or three countries or seven countries. And Apple wants to keep expanding its day one rollout. And it's got a lot of work to do still, you know, we're going to push you on how many of these you can make and we're going to push you on shipping them internationally. And if they truly felt like there was no enough iPhone 10s to get close to demand and not have it be like a disaster where they're turning people away who are going to not ever buy their phone. And you're right, they're investing in those countries. Like China, it's super important because there's definitely a perception that a lot of iPhone sales in China are for appreciably different models. Like when the iPhone changes a lot, when the 6 came out,

there was a huge spike in sales. And so there's anticipation that the 10 is going to be wildly successful in China. And so, you know, they want to be there. But yeah, they said very nice things on the analyst call about India and how encouraged they are

and how that business is growing. So they definitely want to give them some love too. So I think it's a combination of them wanting to up their game in terms of pre-production of units and up their game in terms of distribution in different countries. Because I think ideally Apple would ship phones to every region on day one. I think that's what they really would like to do. And they can't quite do that yet, but I think they want to get there. And so they want to keep pushing on that front.

that yet but um i think they want to get there and so they they want to keep pushing on that front so we have vidit in the chat room who's in india um and vidit is saying that supply is very low right like that they're not distributing it to all the resellers that they usually do right like that it is low i mean it is low everywhere of course but like it is there they're trying right but well and i i think apple probably looks at the india market and says a phone that's $9.99 in the U.S., like there is a very small, small section of the India market that will pay that kind of money for an iPhone. And so they can say that it's in India and they can give some to their partners who can sell them to their very best customers. But they probably don't imagine that that's a huge drain on the production line, right? Because Apple's doing most of its India cultivation at lower price points, where it's more affordable to middle class people in India. But, you know, why not put the iPhone

10 on the list and let your partners there sell those to their, you know, their top notch customers who will pay the most for the latest and greatest. So there sell those to their, you know, their top notch customers who will pay the most for the latest and greatest. So yeah, I think that's reasonable that they're not anticipating it's going to be a huge seller, but they want to have it available in and then they can check it off and say, yeah, we were in India day one. Tyler asked when the iPad eventually gets face ID, do you think they keep the camera at the top or move it to the long side where the thicker longer bezel is what do you think jason that's a good question um apple has aggressively treated the ipad as this like i mean like the logo on it suggests that they they really think people use it in portrait orientation but i use it mostly in landscape i i realize that

perhaps i'm an outlier there. No, no, no. Smart keyboard, right? Like the Apple look at it as both now, right? Like they acknowledge the landscape. I think it's a question of, you know, the cameras in one place. I don't think it matters.

I think they will leave enough of a bezel that it won't necessarily have a notch on the iPad, but they'll try to get it close to the edges much closer to the edges than i mean they've been doing that anyway i they could do a notch but they may not they may not bother with that because they've got more room to play with um i think the real question is going to be letting face id camera and projector and dot projector and all of that do um handle handle both orientations yeah right because the iphone doesn't right now you have to be portrait i don't think they're going to do two sets right they're not going to do two sets of sensors there'll be one set of sensors so if i had to pick where it's going to be my guess is it'll be where it is now which is at the

top in portrait but they're going to need it to work in landscape they wouldn't need two jason need four you'd need four cameras on it if it only works in one orientation right because you could be holding it upside down and like depending on what landscape side there's no specific landscape size you'd need at least three maybe four cameras it'd be wild so i actually think now that face id on the ipad is a little bit further away than i thought it would be? I thought maybe we'd get one next year, but it might be further away than that. Like, the technology has to be better, I guess, to be able to do it in multiple orientations, which they will, I expect, fix eventually, but that might not be immediately. We might still be waiting a little bit for that. Simon wants to know, do you think that we will see any new iPhones coming out of Apple without Face ID in them?

So next year, will Apple sell a new iPhone that does not have Face ID? I think there will be a new iPhone SE that won't have Face ID, right? And I think there will probably be an iteration on the 8, like an 8S or something, that will not have Face ID. I think we have one more year of of non-10 phones right this design i think we have one more year of there being another iteration on the the 687 line before we get to multiple of the new full screen phones they like to keep the old models around so those old models will have it and they will probably do some progression on the old models. I doubt that they'll just be like, here's the iPhone 10.2 and the old iPhones are gone.

You can just keep buying the 8. Like my gut feeling is that there will be an 8S and they'll keep kind of driving that forward. They may not. They may just keep the 8 around and let it kick around for a while. The SE needs an update though. So if I go by the fundamentals of this question I would say yes there will be because I think there'll be a new SE and it'll still not be face ID Mike asked have you noticed any screen issues on the iPhone X like the Pixel 2 XL

I don't have the Pixel 2 XL so I've only read reports about it, I would say, there is a slight color shift, I didn't really see it at first. But if you look at the white screen, and you tilt it a little bit, it gets a little bit bluer. But it's super subtle. My understanding is compared to most OLED screens, Apple's done a good job to kind of like minimize it and have it be not like localized to part of the screen. But it's really kind of the whole thing just makes a little bit bluer. And that's just an OLED thing. I haven't noticed anything beyond that um people have noticed that the the uh auto brightness setting in the display settings is has been moved to accessibility uh it's really been hidden away and on the iphone 10 it actually says if you turn this off it may impact the life of your screen oh wow uh yeah

and that that's an example where apple is trying very hard to get um you to not change that setting because it it might have an impact so yeah if you have to you have to go to general accessibility display, I think. And then, yeah, display accommodations, auto brightness. And it says turning off auto brightness may affect battery life and long-term display performance, right? So Apple is doing a lot of stuff to deal with the fact that it's an OLED screen, but right now it looks great. It looks beautiful. I love the contrast on it. I don't really watch a lot of videos on my iPhone because I prefer my iPad and my iPad Pro can do HDR video too. So that's pretty great. But it's something that bears watching, right? I mean, it is a first generation product. And

even if it's great today, there could be issues that crop up over the next year or two that we learn about and we that we just don't know because it's a it's a new apple product yeah i can't remember where i heard oh this is in uh nilai patel's full review he said like all oled screens have burning it's just a case of how long yeah and and what what apple does to try and subvert it and move move things around right because you can you can try to avoid burn-in in a bunch of ways by changing what's on the screen like like in the notch do they you know try to vary what's in the notch so that it doesn't burn in you know the usual stuff that's in the notch that it's all of these things i'm sure that they're doing a lot of analysis and trying to do what they can in software to mitigate this but it is an oled

screen and yeah there will probably be a story in two or three years where somebody's like oh i can't resell my iphone 10 because it's got some burn-in and that'll be new but you know by by two years from now it might also be like well yep that that's what happens with these screens so who knows i mean that that's the truth of it is we just don't know oh i was going to say one thing i wanted to do a follow-up of uh uh somebody pointed out in the chat room uh i said the iphone 8s but it may be the iphone 9 just to give us an iphone 9 so it isn't just hanging out there like do an iphone 9 it's like like mac os 9 it's like yep and this is the bridge and now we'll have uh have a funeral for the iphone 9 and finally today

charlie wants to know can you send an emojis through other apps other than imessage maybe an app like whatsapp so an emoji is a imessageage application. It's not a standalone thing. It is an app in iMessage. But when you send an Animoji, it's a video file. So you can tap it, you can save it, you can share it in other places. So a way you can do this, send them to yourself.

So just open up iMessage, put in your email address or your phone number, record the Animoji, send it to yourself. Once it's sent, tap on it, then you get the little share button. So you can save it as a video to your camera roll, or you can share it to other applications. It's not ideal, but it's a way to do it. So there you go. And then you can send Animoji, you can put them on Twitter, you can put them on Slack, put them on WhatsApp, wherever you want, whatever you want to do, you put them anywhere. So that's one of the great things

about it is that you can do that because, you know, Apple could have found a way to stop that. And I'm pleased that they didn't because it's allowed for an emoji karaoke, right? Like that's because the fact that you can get them out of iMessage as these video files. All right. So thanks so much for listening to this week's episode. If you want to find our show notes, it's at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 166. If you want to get involved with the show, you can ask us a question for the beginning with the hashtag SnellTalk and that can open up the show with something fun, something different to keep us nice and varied at the beginning. And if you have

any questions you want us to answer that are a bit more technological in nature, you can use the hashtag AskUpgrade and we close out the show with those. If you want to find Jason online, he's at jsnell on Twitter and he's over at sixcolors.com for the great commentary that he does

along with Dan Moran and some other featured guests. I'm at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to Casper, Encapsula and Eero for supporting this week's show and most of all, thank you for listening and we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell.

Goodbye, everybody.